The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
For scalability reasons, a network element that processes application messages may be deployed with multiple processors or blades that are grouped together into a single virtual cluster. Administrators and application programmers interact with the multiple blades as a single node for processing application messages. Each blade in the virtual cluster has the same processing logic and receives the same configuration, enabling an administrator to manage the virtual cluster as if managing a single blade. The blades may be physically distributed without direct hardware interconnects, and may communicate using a logical network mechanism.
An Application Oriented Network (AON) element may consume messages from an ordered source. A messaging queue is one example of an ordered source. The network element may perform application level functions, which are computationally expensive, on the message on behalf of a client. The cost of consuming the messages from the ordered source typically is low compared to the cost of processing the messages in the network element, and therefore a network element can increase processing capacity efficiently by using a virtual cluster of blades.
In such a configuration, the blades in the virtual cluster can consume and process messages in parallel. When a messaging source requires ordered delivery of its messages, the blades in a virtual cluster must ensure that the messages are consumed from the source in the same ordered sequence. Failure to ensure ordered delivery could cause errors at the receiver of the messages.